42 comments:

I am always tempted to ask: What would the revolution have looked like that these people were fighting for?

When I read in that article -- I think -- that the author's Mom took her somewhere (Mifflin St?) where they were tear-gassed, my opinion of the Mom took a bit of a nose dive (A similar thing happened today as I read of a Dad from WV who drove -- with his 9-yo son -- to the GZM protest). Children do not belong in a protest. Parents should be protecting their children.

I did not know about any of this so I read the linked story with great interest. Then the author lost me at The CIA torture techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan, like waterboarding, are hardly an improvement on the nasty business of pushing people out of helicopters in Vietnam

From the Isthmus article:As the late Howard Zinn often pointed out, the anti-Vietnam War movement was, by and large, peaceful. The Sterling Hall bombing was the exception. And even there, the bombers planned their attack in the middle of the night, when the building was supposed to be empty — a far cry from the deliberate murder of 3,000 World Trade Center workers nine years ago.

Bullshit. This probably got hashed out at their respective trials, but Armstrong and Fine gave unsupportable evidence for their motivation. Their carelessness towards life was just not just Sterling Hall but an earlier attempt too: linkage

The writer sounds like she was indoctrinated rather than raised. Her mother did a fine job. It's rare that you see a young person with such a thorough belief in all the liberal positions. On Christmas eve, Daddy used to dress up like a cop and steal all the presents to drive home the lesson.

I am always tempted to ask: What would the revolution have looked like that these people were fighting for?

Agreed. If there's not tear gas at an absolute minimum at your revolution, then it's not much of a revolution. At best, you'll get some bullshit incremental, negotiated change like England's So-Called Glorious Revolution or the Magna Carta (and even for the Magna Carta there was a half-fledged coup).

Morons. What? Are the cops going to come down the street with free bong hits and lemonade for the revolution?

Obama's mentor, the murderous Bill Ayers, once told an FBI undercover agent that after the revolution, huge segments of the population would of course go to re-education camps. Ayers added that he expected that 10% or so of the population woulod be resistant to the new order, and would have to be liqudated. that is 10% of 250 million people, or 25 million...quite a great guy, no?

What would the revolution have looked like that these people were fighting for?

Who are "these people"? The bombers?

The pure anti-war protestors were largely satisfied when we pulled out of Vietnam. Eighteen year olds freshly granted the vote did not sweep McGovern into office. Mass student protests did not take place for decades. In 1974 some of my classmates even outed themselves as Republican.

The peace movement was mostly peaceful because of the cognitive dissonance produced by simultaneously rejecting and embracing violence.

Children do not belong in a protest. Parents should be protecting their children.

When was this teargassing? Conniff was born in late September, 1968. Had it happened in response to the bombing, Conniff would have been almost two years old. Would her mother still have spoken of her as a "baby"? More likely they would have been teargassed in 1969, not later.

Now I think of Madison as a tolerant, laidback place, so it's hard for me to think that - even after the Democratic convention of 1968, and the King assassination riots across America -- things would get out of control to the point of needing to be subdued with tear gas, and maybe Conniff's mom thought so, too.

What was the state of campus unrest in Madison in 1969? How had police been responding?

Or if you mean Conniff's mom's revolution, it was peace, love, and dope. Babies in snuglis and big dogs on porches with bandanas for handkerchiefs. People doing jobs they loved rather than working in accounts receivable for Oscar Mayer. Maternity leave.

AlphaLiberal ought to be offering his comments to this thread, since apparently he is a stooge for the Progressive Labor Party. As such he should offer us all an opinion on the utility of political violence.

fls doesn't seem aware what things were like at the time, i.e., the local citizens were seeing anarchy take place all around them. In retrospect, it's sheer luck that more weren't killed. The leftists were hoping for it, that's a certainty, for they were trying to spark a revolution.

** 3 days before the shooting, in downtown Kent, a roving mob of earnest antiwar activists, hard-core radicals, curious students and others smashed 50 bank and store windows, looted a jewelry store and hurled bricks and bottles at police.

**Four officers suffered injuries, and the mayor declared a civil emergency. Only tear gas dispersed the mob. The FBI determined that the riot was planned.

**This same group burned the ROTC headquarters on the Kent State campus, which triggered the deployment of the National Guard there.

**the FBI developed credible evidence suggesting that there was a sniper and that one or more shots may have been fired at the guardsmen first.

**FBI informant and part-time Kent State student Terry Norman was armed with a snub-nosed revolver that FBI ballistics tests concluded had indeed been discharged on that day.

**Before the fatal volley, the ROTC cadet told the FBI, he "heard one round, a pause, two rounds, and then the M-1s opened up." ..."the first three rounds were definitely not M-1s. He said they could possibly have been a .45 caliber."

**The cadet also told the FBI he observed demonstrators carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and improvised weapons, including pieces of steel wire cut into footlong sections, along with radios and other electronic devices "used to monitor the police and Guard wavelengths."

@FLS, point of information. You couldn't have been there and still call the demonstrations "peaceful." I was there. I remember.

The normal mode of operation was to have guys in front throwing things at the police and goading them into action -- then they'd yell "chicks to the front" in the expectation that the police wouldn't hit a woman.

My pont being that the leaders -- the Mark Rudds, the Jerry Rubins, the Tom Haydens, the Abbie Hoffmans -- deliberately set out to cause a violent confrontation, then they'd let someone else (a chick, preferrably) get their skulls cracked.

Hey, Althouse! Were you ever one of those chicks who were supposed to dutifully move to the front of the demonstration so you could take the brunt of the police batons?